French presidential candidate for the center-right party Les Républicains (The Republicans), François Fillon, denounced the publication on his Twitter account of a anti-Semitic of his opponent Emmanuel Macron depicting him as a hook-nosed banker in a top hat cutting a cigar with the Communist symbol of the red sickle.

Fillon promised to discipline party officials who published the anti-Semitic propaganda.

The caricature, entitled “The truth about Macron’s galaxy”, sparked outrage because it is reminiscent of the 1930s anti-Semitic campaign.

Macron,, who is not Jewish, has worked at the Rothschild investment bank.

Fillon called the caricature ‘’unacceptable’’. “I understand the anxiety this could have caused because it evokes the drawings of a dark period of our history and conveys an ideology I have always fought against,” he said.

He added: “The political battle is tough, but it must stay dignified. I will not tolerate my party publishing caricatures that use the codes of anti-Semitic propaganda.”

The party later replaced the caricature with a photograph of Macron and deleted the original tweet. The party’s secretary general, Bernard Accoyer, issued a statement apologising for the image which he said was open to being “wrongly interpreted”.

Macron’s spokesman Benjamin Griveaux declared: “The use of terms and imagery that draw on antisemitic fantasy is extremely worrying for the quality of debate in the republic but also for the state of mind that prevails in certain party headquarters.”